MAY I commend you and your journalists for exposing the fact that young people in the care of Bolton Social Services are working as child prostitutes.

I was shocked and distressed to hear that young Carly Bateman had been murdered, and that Charlene Dyson died at home of a heroin overdose, and she too had been working as a prostitute to fund her drug dependency.

The cases raise a number of disturbing issues which need to be addressed locally and nationally.

Councillor White states that "the system needs to be changed and we need some sort of sanction to protect girls from themselves, but the child has rights like anyone else."

I was astonished to read this interpretation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989, and has become international law to uphold basic rights for children. Twelve years have elapsed since its adoption and notification, yet Coun White (and presumably those social work managers who advise him), are equating children's rights with the rights of a child (below the age of consent) to be sexually abused by adult clients, and to be subjected to exploitive and degrading treatment by male clients and pimps. This interpretation is in direct contradiction to the letter and spirit of the UN Convention, and the subsequent Children's Act.

As to J Hayes question why women MPs weren't prepared to help their sisters, perhaps he and the men and women in Bolton would be surprised to learn that an MP from Crosby and Shirley Williams have organised an all-party parliamentary group of MPs (50 of them) including representatives of the Lords, to investigate the processes involved in convicting paedophiles who have been found guilty by justices and judges, and who are serving prison sentences for abusing children in residential care homes. Presumably the convicted paedophiles will be getting legal aid to have their cases reviewed and overturned.

It would seem that the MPs place more importance on the rights of convicted paedophiles than the lives of two young child prostitutes, one dying alone in an alley, and other in her bedroom of a heroin overdose. Wouldn't their time, effort and money be better spent on a large-scale nationally-funded preventative strategy and action to tackle child prostitution, and to ensure that young people like Charlene Dyson do not have to endure agonising withdrawal symptoms alone, without humane medical treatment and specialist rehabilitation to wean her off drugs.

I urge the caring citizens of Bolton to write to your MPs, demanding that the Minister for Health asks immediate questions from Bolton Social Services as to what has gone wrong in these tragic cases. Two young lives have been extinguished and the distorted response of some of our MPs is to place the rights of paedophiles above the protection and interests of our children. Have we learned nothing from history?

The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 raised the age of consent to 16, saved countless young child prostitutes from enticement, abduction or sale into brothels. In 2001 with all the resources of the state at our disposal, child prostitution is flourishing in Bolton. This is a matter of national shame.

Mrs M J Woodward,

Duxbury Avenue,

Harwood.